Greetings,
I'm a very long-time unix user, and I just noted that in RHEL5, version 5.97
(and reproduced again on 6.9) of coreutils, the rm command behaves
improperly: It prompts the user for removal of a read-only file, even when
the -i option is not specified (using /bin/rm, no aliases, etc). Further, it
removes it when input is provided by /dev/null. Essentially, there is no
way to use the rm command to skip over read-only files without prompting the
user!! This is a serious bug, IMHO. While there is a 'yes' command to force
an arbitrary answer to all commands ("yes n" will produce line-terminated
"n"'s until the pipeline terminates), it does not work with rm!!
$ touch test
$ chmod u-w test
$ rm test
rm: remove write-protected regular empty file `test'?
The following also incorrectly remove the file:
$ touch test
$ chmod u-w test
$ rm test </dev/null
$ touch test
$ chmod u-w test
$ yes "n" | rm test
I shudder to think of the disastrous consequences this has had.
--
WC Fields - "A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money."
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